The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel
Christmas Eve
December 24, 2009
First Congregational Church,
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
I have a vision of what the perfect weather should be on Christmas Eve, and let me tell you, this is not it. I wanted the perfect smattering of snow, just enough to be pretty, but not enough to get out a shovel. But instead I’ve been watching the weather reports and then the real weather itself, and here we are in an ice storm. In cases like that I always wonder, is any body going to show up?
But I know I should never doubt you hearty members of First Congregational and your hearty friends and family. On a night with an ice storm and treacherous streets, surely God has meant for you to be here, and you were determined to be, as well. We are a tough and hardy lot.
But they’re not so tough in New England, where I hailed from, where there was a story about a crusty old Vermont farmer who showed up for church in an ice storm and he was the only parishioner there besides the pastor. The pastor, delighted and relieved to have at least one worshipper, proceeded to go through the entire service with great enthusiasm, singing all four hymns, delivering the anthems himself and delivering a lengthy sermon. When he concluded at the end of the hour, he greeted his lone parishioner saying, “You know farmer Pete, Jesus said that where just two or three are gathered in my name, I am with them.”
To which the farmer responded, “I don’t know about that pastor. When I’m out in the field and only one head of cattle shows up to eat, I don’t dump out the entire feed truck for him.”
But I’m glad you’re here so we can dump out the entire feed truck for all of you on this Christmas Eve. Because the weather outside is frightful, but church is so delightful, and you know what, the weather doesn’t have to be perfect for the Son of God to arrive right on time.
But it’s sometimes hard to let go of perfection isn’t it? The ideal of what something should be.
In a recent issue of the New York Times Magazine the cover read “Married (Happily) with Issues.” The tag line read, “The author had a good marriage but thought it could be improved. She dragged her husband through all sorts of therapies. Here’s what they learned and what they didn’t.” [1]
The woman writing the article was on a mission, with her opening line, “I have a pretty good marriage. It could be better. But in general we do ok.” She went on to say, “The idea of trying to improve our marriage came to me one night in bed. As I lay there I started wondering why I wasn’t applying myself to becoming a better spouse. My marriage was good, utterly central to my existence, yet in no other aspect of my life was I so laissez-faire. Like most of my peers, I applied myself to school, friendship, work, health and, ad nauseam, raising my children. But in this critical area, marriage, we had all turned away. I wanted to understand why. I wanted not to accept this.” She said of her husband, “Dan, too, had worked tirelessly at skill acquisition…yet he shared the seemingly widespread aversion to the very idea of marriage improvement. Why such passivity? What did we all fear?”
So they spent a year going to every kind of marriage improvement therapy they could find. And you can imagine what happened. Very little good came of the wife dragging her husband to one therapist after another. Love exercises, marriage education classes, sex therapy, behavior therapy, each for just a little time, did little for their marriage. The article ended up poking fun at all the various ways to improve marriage but, to my reading, it was more of an indictment of the couple.
They came off as self-centered, ungrateful for the fact that they had a pretty good marriage. The article seemed to make light of the real issues that people work on in their marriages, the real pain and problems that people take seriously.
These people were lily dippers, taking something basically good, monkeying around with it, but not in a serious or thoughtful way over time. So lo and behold they decided in the end that what they had was good enough. No surprise to find out that the author of this self-serving article is now writing her own book about marriage.
Tellingly, the article was entitled “A More Perfect Union.” More perfect, that was what they were after. They had it good but they wanted it to be better. For some people, particularly people of privilege, nothing is good enough as it is.
I think about the conversations that take place in the days leading up to this holiday. People say things like, “I have my whole extended family coming over so I have been cleaning non stop. I feel like my house has to be perfect.”
Someone else will say, “We always go over to my mother-in-law’s and the place is spotless. She pulls it off so effortlessly; it makes me feel like my own life is chaotic. I don’t know how she does it.”
Someone else is cleaning off his desk at work, trying to get out the door and leave all those worries at the office to enjoy a few days off. But he knows the same problems will be waiting for him when he gets back. Perhaps if he just puts in a few more hours now on Christmas Eve, before going home, he can have a bit less stress when he returns to work in the new year, and that will help him to be better company at home.
When he finally gets home, later than he thought, his family glares at him. It was going to be another imperfect holiday, no matter what he did. He wondered: if a tree falls in the forest, and no woman is there to hear it, is the man still wrong? Always wrong?
This Christmas, after over a year of a very imperfect economy that has added much chaos into lives that now stand little chance of being perfect, I would like to remind you that when God chose to come to earth in human form, he clearly was not aiming for perfect.
Consider the readings that you have heard so far this beautiful evening. When God chose the mother, it was an unmarried teenager. When God chose her husband, he chose a fiancé who had to be willing to take on a pregnant bride. When God chose the location, it was not a well-appointed birthing suite in a first rate hospital, but a stable full of dirty animals.
When God chose the first visitors for the baby Jesus, it wasn’t a loving, stable and well-organized extended family with casseroles, vacuum cleaners and bottles of Febreze, but rather a bunch of shepherds. And the holy family didn’t get a call from church folks, but instead got a visit from three strange wise men from the east representing entirely foreign religions that they had never heard of.
When it came to God coming into the world in human form, in order to redeem it, clearly things did not have to be perfect.
If the birth of Jesus did not have to be perfect, why should you hold yourself to a higher standard? If the original holiday took place in chaos, why can’t we embrace a little chaos too?
If your marriage isn’t perfect, if your house isn’t clean, if your job is not stable, if your future is unclear, if your life lacks organization, if your children don’t have it all figured out, if your parents are driving you crazy, if your dogs pee on the couch and your cats ignore you – go easy on yourself.
If Jesus, the Son of God, could be born into imperfection, it probably won’t kill any of us.
And I trust that none of that was an accident. Perhaps God, being perfect, being the only one capable of perfection, sent his son into the world the way he did for a reason. To remind us all that it doesn’t have to be perfect.
Because when things are perfect there’s no room for anything else. But when things are imperfect we tend to look for what God is sending into the world – and that is love. Imperfection makes room and space for love.
I once knew a woman who was a magnificent entertainer. There was something about a meal at her house that topped everything. It was not the cooking by the way. Sometimes that was delicious, but other times, the gravy was likely to have burned on the stove, or the chicken was frighteningly undercooked in the center, or the whole meal came out an hour late, blackened and crunchy. And that was just the green beans.
But there was something about being at that table that pointed you toward abundance. You knew you were special; that someone had set the table for you, put on festive music, and even if the food was strange, you knew you had been well-served because you were a part of this magnificent gathering. There were flowers on the table and candles – in fact, the hostess’ motto was “Well, it may not be good but it’ll certainly be fancy.” And every guest felt well served.
One night, she came out more than an hour late, dressed to the nines in a sparkly outfit a couple sizes too small, red high heel shoes clicking across the floor holding, on a giant tray, a magnificent roasted duck.
It was a brand new recipe for her. We had waited a long time for the meal, but now it appeared. It was hard to find the duck on the plate, for in her enthusiasm for her project she had gone heavy on the garnish. It was like a parsley explosion of culinary enthusiasm, a product of a long day’s work, cheerfully given.
But then, somehow, the combination of all the greenery, and the grease of the duck and a fold in the carpet just underneath her high-heeled shoes, all came together in the perfect storm. And as she tripped, the duck she had spent the day preparing went flying across the room, and landed where once it had had its tail feathers, skidded across the floor down the front hall only to stop on the muddy doormat, a trail of grease and parsley garnish in its sad wake.
The hostess had a moment where tears welled up, and there was a collective gasp among the guests. You could see she was thinking about how she would be judged. She knew from experience how easy people find it to mock a person of enthusiasm and passion, particularly when things go wrong.
But then it was as if a new spirit came upon her, and she pulled her little shoulders back, marched over to the duck on the doormat, stooped down and picked it up, as she announced to the group, “Let me just take a minute, to get this duck, go back in the kitchen and throw it away, and I’ll be back in just a minute with the other duck.”
And a few minutes later she made another grand entrance, this time avoiding the crease in the carpet, and this time with a duck even more heavily disguised in garnish, to cover the bruises, for of course, as we all knew, there was no other duck. This was it.
But the holy spirit of hospitality was such that without a word, it was as if the guests collectively decided to replace the world’s petty practices of judgment and critique with a spirit of generosity. And by all agreeing to see the moment through those eyes, all in this shared delusion together that there was another duck, perfection was been quite literally taken off the table.
And we ate well that night, feasting less on the damaged duck than on the grace that was served to both an embarrassed hostess and to her hungry guests. Which is a lot like the church when we’re at our best, or like loving friends and family at our best, feasting at a table where perfection has been replaced by love.
That great hostess has since departed this earthly world, her time here far too short. So when I picture heaven, she’s the one I imagine ushering me into the afterlife with a plate of burnt hors d’oeuvres. There we’re all gathered around the table, with those we have loved, but also with those we have not loved, those we have judged, and those who have judged us, those we have admired, those who have let us down, all of us eating at the table together, imperfect every one.
And what is served at that heavenly and reconciling banquet? Is the food perfect, healthy, subtly seasoned, graciously gourmet, the cuisine judged by all to be above reproach?
No, that perfect nonsense is what we’re all obsessed about in this world. In eternity, I’m convinced - we’ll all be eating that other duck.
May you have a blessed and imperfect Christmas.